He turned back to the window again-just as it erupted inward in a storm of daggerlike glass shards and reaching tongues of purple and white flame.
Aldimar flung himself over onto his back and let the blast tumble him across the room, shouting, 'Get down!'
Perivel hesitated for only a moment before following Thamalon in a dive to the floor. He was bare inches from landing when something dazzling surged over the balcony like a huge wave crashing over a beach and racing across the land beyond. The room exploded in light.
The floor rose to meet Perivel's chin, rattling his teeth as he fell, and air so hot that it blistered his cheek howled over him.
When he could see again, the air was full of a sharp scorched smell, and little fires were dancing in many places along the walls and ceiling. Somewhere in front of him his father made a horrible wet groaning sound.
'Father?' he called.
'I am that,' came the reply, the voice so strained that Perivel scarcely recognized it.
Perivel found his feet, somehow, the room seeming to tilt and spin crazily around him, and tried to stride forward. It was like stumbling along the deck of a ship pitching in the worst swells of a storm. A red haze seemed to be creeping in around the edges of his vision, and behind him he could see Thamalon clawing his way feebly over the jagged remnants of what had been a gilded chair scant moments before. There was blood all over his brother's face.
'Perivel,' the master of Stormweather Towers said calmly from somewhere amid the dust-choked chaos ahead, 'stay back.' His father's voice was raw with pain and still threaded with a wet bubbling, but at least it sounded like Aldimar Uskevren again.
'Father?' Perivel called, clambering on over shattered furniture, and fumbling vaguely for the sword that didn't seem to be in his hand any more.
'Perivel, keep back.'
The snap of command in his father's voice brought Perivel to a halt, blinking and peering. He was in time to see another turret, torn apart by spells, begin its deafening, ground-shaking fall to the earth below. He watched it through a larger opening than before. The row of windows was all gone, and the garden wall that had held them was also missing.
Perivel's thoughts ran on in dull confusion. At some time during his ruminations, as other spells rent the night outside, he fell back to the floor and rolled over to find Thamalon crawling up to him. The youngest Uskevren was blinking at his brother through a mask of blood. Clutched in one of his hands was Perivel's missing sword.
'Brother,' he gasped, 'I-'
Whatever he might have said next died, forever unspoken, as they heard their father murmur something that began too low to hear, and rose with terrible passion into words they could not understand. It was a surge of rising grief and fury that seemed to pull the floor under them into a matching rise and surge, like a wave racing toward shore.
The two brothers tumbled together in its wake, rolling over and gasping in ragged unison at the fresh pains of being dragged over splintered furniture.
They fetched up against a toppled, now armless statue of a winged woman who'd always displayed more artful drapery than modesty, and found themselves facing the missing wall again-and their father.
Aldimar Uskevren was straddling a rising, rolling knoll of stone like a rider urging a galloping horse forward in a race. Bent low over floor tiles that were flowing as if they were made of sap or syrup and not rigid stone, he was moving away from them, surging forward on a magical wave.
He was heading for the huge opening where the solar windows had been, toward the courtyards below where the Talendar and Soargyl mages were standing. The stones moving with him were making horrible groaning, deep- voiced creaking sounds that almost overwhelmed the strange little voice coming from Aldimar.
The head of House Uskevren was humming contentedly to himself.
'Father?' Perivel called, 'what're you doing?'
'Dying, son,' Aldimar said deliberately, as the flood of stone took him out of the room and up into the sky. 'I'm busy dying. Please don't bother me now.'
The sons of the Uskevren found themselves clawing at pillars and the edges of rolling, broken rocks to keep from being carried out of the solar by the ongoing stream of stone. Aldimar was high above them now, the wave of stone blotting out the moonlight as it arched up and on.
There were shouts from the grounds below, and the flashes and crackles of several spells. One of them sent a web of crawling, clawing lightning across the huge tongue of moving stone. His sons saw Aldimar reel and writhe as its blue fingers washed over him.
'Father,' Perivel cried, 'why are you doing this?'
The head of House Uskevren twisted to look back at his sons. 'A man is but memories of deeds done, in the end,' he bellowed. 'Deeds measured by promises kept! Don't forget, both of you: Uskevren keep their promises!'
He gave them a wave that became a brutal, chopping signal to the magic he rode-and the wave of stone crashed down with sudden, terrible speed.
The shattered solar rocked as that fist of the stones hit the ground. Perivel and Thamalon clawed and sprinted and stumbled forward in desperate haste.
They were in time to see the terrible crash that transformed Marmaeron Talendar, head of the house of that name, and almost thirty armsmen and hired mages around him, into bloody pulp. They were in time to see their father's contorted body, reeling atop it all, consumed by the rushing, glowing energies of the magic he'd raised. They heard Aldimar's last, ringing cry, 'Die, Soargyls! Die, Talendars! And know you full well at last: Uskevren keep their promises!'
The words were a roar above the rising dust, a call made loud by magic after the lips that had uttered it were burned to nothingness, and gone. Aldimar Uskevren was no more.
Perivel and Thamalon stared at the rubble-strewn courtyard through glimmering tears. Nothing moved in it now but the lazily curling dust-and one injured bird, who fluttered away from the cracked, crazily leaning fountain and flew drunkenly, in obvious distress, up into the ruined room where the guards had died, and out of view.
'F-father,' Thamalon whispered. 'You shall be avenged. This I swear.'
'This we swear,' Perivel echoed, in a voice like a gem-knife cutting glass. He raised his hand, and sketched a salute with the sword he held in it-not his own blade, lost again by Thamalon somewhere in all the tumbling, but the warsword that had hung in its case on the solar wall for as long as either Uskevren son could remember.
Blue fire ran along the blade, gathered in a cloud of spitting sparks at its tip, and spat a bolt of lightning across the courtyard. Perivel and Thamalon exchanged astonished glances.
'What other secrets does this house hold, I wonder?' the younger son breathed, watching the runes glowing along Perivel's sword.
His brother gave him a dark look. 'Don't worry,' Perivel muttered. 'We're unlikely to stay alive long enough to find out.'
He leveled the sword at the distant, leaning fountain, set his jaw, and watched the leaning stone topple slowly into complete collapse in the heart of leaping lightning.
On the other side of Stormweather Towers, another young, angry man with a sword in his hand glared at the lightning and snarled, 'I thought you said there was no one left alive back there.'
The panting, bleeding, bearded man crumpled against the gatepost shuddered as his shattered arm sent fresh agonies through him, bent his head for a moment to struggle against the pain, then sobbed as the man with the sword kicked him impatiently.
'C-crave pardon, Lord Talendar,' the injured man gasped, 'but I spoke truth. There was none but me and heaped stone there when I flew away.'
'Then that must be Uskevren work,' another of the men standing nearby growled, hefting his own sword in his hand. 'So they do have a tame wizard.'
'Aldimar Uskevren always claimed he wanted nothing to do with magic,' a third young noble protested, waving a jeweled hand axe.
'Aldimar Uskevren made a lot of false claims, it seems,' snapped Lord Rajeldus Talendar. He'd been head of his house for a bare handful of minutes, but already he was sounding more bitter, more serious. Ruling families did
